The Haunted Level by Cassiter Wright appeared in the June 1944 issue of The Wide World. I seriously looked for this but I couldn’t even find a shot of the cover; it has a guy with a mustache in a beater and a hat standing in a jungle pointing out across a lagoon.

Taking a break from old SF pulps, I decided to take a look at some contemporary WWII era adventure mags. Don’t let the subtitle fool you; in this “Magazine for Men” you won’t find titillating ladies (not manly enough!) nor the tom-shennanigannery of flesh-ripping weasels. No, here you will find tales of blood and empire and manly men doing manly things to keep the British Empire great (and manly). Those without ridiculous mustaches on stiff upper lips need not apply!

Now, I also gather that The Wide World poses itself as a “True Story”/ “True Adventure” type magazine, so a lot of these stories will probably be from the angle of “Let me tell you about this awesome thing that happened to me in X part of the Empire” (Cassiter Wright, for instance, is “a veteran mining engineer”); whether they be fact or fiction, I’ll not speculate on heavily, but from the very outset it looks like these are going to be some great stories and well told.

The opening story, The Haunted Level, is an account of a gold mine on the Gold Coast. The narrator tells you that he can’t give you the real name of the mine, but you’d know it if you heard it, as it was a mine that was still in operation and still quite profitable. But this is a story about one of the bleaker, tougher times.

So, things are looking bad for the mine – there’s gold coming out of the mine still, but not enough to be profitable and not enough to sustain them long enough to divert the manpower needed to explore new levels and find richer veins. There is one solution, though… Back when the French had the mines, level 2 was said to be exceptionally rich, but it had been walled up on account of being stacked floor to ceiling with ghosts. Supposedly there had been a cave in that had trapped and killed some workers and now their souls were stuck there; no natives would work the level on account of the “fantods” and “devil-devils” that would rise up in from the ground and then vanish.

Still, they’ve got to get the mines profitable again or everyone will be out of work, so they unbrick the entrance to level 2 and set about to explore it and try to prove that it’s not haunted so that the native miners will be willing to work. There are some bats and lots of guano, as level 2 must break surface somewhere, but there’s also still plenty of gold. With the help of a few of the more reliable natives, they’re able to convince the other miners that everything is a-ok and you’re not going to be snatched up by devil-devils. Sure enough, level 2 starts producing. And the specialists are able to begin work on blasting a new shaft. Everything is hunky-dory until someone sees a ghost on level 2, causes a panic, and several are hurt or killed while trying to flee the mines. It’s no good; the mines are doomed if they don’t clear a new level and the workers refuse to mine on level 2.

With some ingenious thinking, experimentation, and fortuitous timing, however, the foremen are able to solve the mystery and save the day. The phantasms only appeared at certain times. They will have to prove once and for all that there are no devil-devils – they drag a bunch of miners back with them and ready their watches: they will predict the exact moment that the phantoms will appear. Almost as if on command, there is a rumbling far below and wisps of smoke rise from the ground, swirl in the light, and settle back to the ground.

It turned out that when the miners had been blasting new tunnels, the gas had been forced upwards, expelling smoke and dust through the cracks in the floor, giving both the appearance of the phantoms and the accompanying smell of brimstone. They all have a laugh about it. The mine is able to stay open; Level 2 was able to tide them over, and they hit a far richer vein lower that has made the mine more profitable today than it had ever been in its history.

One of the things that struck me about this was how evocative the writing was throughout. Though the mystery is solved and had natural causes at its root, The Haunted Level is written with all of the flair and finesse of the best strains of horror, from the claustrophobia of being deep under earth to the otherworldly apparitions that have the native workers so terrified. Clever, funny, exciting and frightful, all at once. The most damnably shameful part is that I’ve failed to find a scan of this issue on the internet, and I don’t know that I’m willing to sacrifice my copy to make one.

I don’t know that I will review the entire issue, as it’s harder for me to go back and get choice pull quotes when I can’t pull up a scan. Plus, it’s like I’m rubbing in your face that I have this awesome old magazine that you can’t read. But I wanted to look at some magazines that are contemporary with the Sci-Fi I’ve been reading, and I gotta say it’s pretty great stuff all around!

Been awhile since I’ve done one of these, but now’s as good a time as any. I’m done with the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales, so it’s time to take a look at the fan letters to try to answer the time-old question: who was reading the pulps?

Turns out, Ladies, Ladies, Ladies!

Gee, it’s a relief to have a subscription to WT and see it in the mail box each month–so much better than chasing from newsstand to shop looking for ’em. The Finlay cover on the January issue was a treat. – Caroline Ferber

Caroline also describe’s Lovecraft’s collab with Zealia Bishop, Medusa’s Coil as “most outstanding” and “one that [she] will remember the longest.” She also wishes WT will have more Thorp McClusky vampire stories, more Jirel of Joiry, and more Northwest Smith.

Have held out for ten years or more now but am finally compelled to write you. WT has been my only steady during this time and I’ve accumulated no end of questions and pleas; so hope your patience holds out this time and I’ll try not to be a nuisance… I’ve been waiting patiently or otherwise for more Jirel of Joiry stories. It’s been a long time. Northwest Smith is grand and the more of him the better, but please, some Jirel of Joiry–there’ll never be anyone to compare with her. – Miss W.C. Reinke

A Leah Bodine Drake writes in to gush about A. Merritt’s The Woman of the Woods, asking the editors to “puh-leaze reprint” it and also deems Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop’s Medusa’s Coil the “best” of the January issue.

But who wouldn’t want to meet this dame?

Just a few lines to say how much I enjoy your delightfully different magazine. I have long been a reader of Weird Tales and find each issue more fascinating than the last. Your authors are in a class by themselves, with [Henry] Kuttner and [Seabury] Quinn a bit above the rest and [Thomas P.] Kelley rising head and shoulders above them all. His I Found Cleopatra promises to surpass even The Last Pharaoh and that was a literary masterpiece. Let’s have him ever month. Best wishes to your magazine. I rave about it so much my friends call me Miss Weird Tales. – Alice Harding

The Devils of Po Sung by Bassett Morgan appeared in the December 1927 issue of Weird Tales and was the featured Weird Story Reprint in the March 1939 issue. A scanned pdf of this issue can be found here at Luminist.org.

I’ll admit, at first I had a bit of a tough time getting into The Devils of Po Sung. The florid narrative prose was challenge enough, but every character (except for the devil mongrel Chinaman, ironically enough) speaks in very thick vernacular and/or pidgin. The story begins a bit clunky and actually hits a lot of the notes and “tropes that the pulps were known for” – remarkable because this is really the first I’ve encountered it – I almost gave up on this one. But I’m really glad I didn’t, and once this story hit its stride, I could see why they chose to reprint it.

Captain McTeague is a trader in skins and pearls from Papua. Papua’s full of evil shamans, debbil-debbils, head-hunters, and worse, but money is money and there’s plenty to be made by a man brave enough to deal with it all. A wicked tribal warlord-slash-witchman named Tukmoo had been known for having the best pearl lagoon in Papua, but suddenly he’s out of the picture, the pearl supply has started to dry up, and McTeague wants to know why. At the suggestion of the Chinese middleman the old shaman uses, McTeague goes down the coast to seek out Tukmoo only to be caught in a storm and then chased by a ship belonging to the one man more dreadful than Tukmoo: Po Sung.

“McTeague knew as much as any other man about Po Sung. He was a Mongolian tainted with the worst of other strains of heritage. He spoke excellent English, was suave in company of Europeans and had so huge a grasp of trade that he was a valued confidant of port merchants and diplomats for some years while he perfected his own sovereignty in hidden realms of wealth. Po Sung was like a giant octopus with tentacles reaching to every compass point. Now that he was growing old he had brazenly disdained the guise of decency and his true colors, secure from vengeance in some backwater shelter where he devised and executed his schemes unmolested.”

McTeague anchors his schooner in a lagoon to make repairs; ominous drums in the jungle communicate his arrival. The next morning, Tukmoo shows up in all of his tribal splendor:

“Tukmoo wore a necklace of pearls as large as his finger ends, strung between human incisor teeth. He was plumed and painted, covered from forehead to heel with blue lace of tattooing beaded with cicatrices. A scarlet loin-cloth supported a club knobbed with human knuckle-bones. The forty paddles stabbed the water as one, and McTeague was wondering (since there are but two in a set) how many incisor teeth went into that necklace, when Tukmoo reached the deck, and planted his prehensile-toed feet firmly, demanded in fairly fluent pidgin-English, strong drink.”

It turns out that the lagoon McTeague sought shelter in is where Tukmoo set up shop after being driven out of his previous domain. Po Sung ran out Tukmoo and his tribe with magics and devils more powerful than even the tribal sorcerer could conjure. Worse, Po Sung has Tukmoo’s son and Tukmoo is working tortures on his son’s betrothed to make magics to fight Po Sung’s devils (but “Not enough to injure her comeliness, because if she is not killed for a debbil feast, [he] will sell her to a big-bellied Chinese trader.”) McTeague convinces Tukmoo that “she will prove a help to [their] magic if she were told she will be taken with [them] so that her liver, hot with love for [Tukmoo’s] son Tawa, will smell out the place where he is kept prisoner.” Tukmoo is fine with this arrangement and so sends McTeague along with his cabin-boy and the girl to go find Po Sung.

On the way, they’re waylaid by strange talking animals, apes and mugger crocodiles, and fight their way out. Eventually they reach Po Sung’s hide-out. Po-Sung himself is sort of a mix of Fu Manchu and Dr. Moreau. He’s bred a variety of orchid to be carnivorous and uses them for guarding his house. Playing the role of consummate host, Po Sung makes sure McTeague is well treated and cared for as he’s shown the wonders of Po Sung’s horrors. He’s been sticking human brains into animals and feeding the bodies to his orchids. The talking ape McTeague shot? Tukmoo’s son. It’s fine, though, because Tawa will be reunited with his love if he survived the gunshot, because Po Sung has stuck the brain of his fiancé into an ape. And McTeague’s in luck, because Po Sung has spared no expense in procuring a fine Orangutan specimen to stick his brain in.

After some menace and horrors, the plans of Po Sung are eventually laid to waste by his own creations; jungle apes attack his compound and start killing everyone, and McTeague is carried out of the carnage by Tawa’s ape-ified bride. McTeague is feted by Tukmoo for having dealt with Po Sung, but McTeague just wishes he could forget all that he saw.

So, interesting bits:

There is magic; McTeague has bits of sorcery and juju that could ostensibly aid him. Some of it is clearly stated to be “parlor tricks” and includes, among other things, black powder, fuses and caps, but it’s referred to in the story and by the characters as magic. This is part of how the lines of science and sorcery are blended in weird fiction.

Po Sung is presented as something of both sorcerer and mad scientist. He’s been doing some serious GMO botany, for one thing, but he has a pervasive mystic evil about him; yeah, he’s doing mad science, but he’s more akin to a necromancer than your typical mad scientist.

There are some similarities to the Isle of Doctor Moreau, namely talking animals and the ending where they kill everybody, but it’s also an “into the heart of darkness” type story, literally going up the river towards evil, and Po Sung, the most outwardly civilized despite his “mongrel heritage”, is shown to be a class of evil beyond even Tukmoo, “who punished infidelity of women by having them devour facial features of their lovers uncooked and sliced from the living victim,” who could be, if not excused, explained as just being a savage and superstitious native.

The Devils of Po Sung is a nightmarish, bloody and brutal tale. It would probably surprise you that it was written by a woman. Despite being having published a few novels, selling to several magazines and even landing two Weird Tales cover stories (Black Bagheela and The Wolf-Woman), Bassett Morgan is not a name that I see come up often in discussions about the pulps or women in science fiction. South Seas adventure horror SF with lots of blood & guts seems to be her thing (Jo March if she’d stuck with penny-dreadfuls?!), so if that’s up your alley, you definitely need to check her out.

And instead of celebrating, I feel like I need to add some clarifying commentary to the ongoing war between SFF and Hard Bros SF.

Both sides have misrepresented or misunderstood the role that the Futurians and other sundry communist agitators played in the scifi divide. In fact, the ghost of Damon Knight is laughing at you guys for playing into their hands.

The Futurians weren’t exactly the ones writing or pushing Hard Science Fiction over Soft Science Fiction. What WAS happening, however, was that communists in the fandom were leveraging the nudniks against the editors and fans of more adventure-centric fiction.

Despite what you may have heard, the pulps were fairly progressive, exploring a wide range of social topics, except they still had a focus on individuality, struggle against unjust authority, and were frequently anti-Communist. To repeat the cringy boomertarian meme, “socially liberal, fiscally conservative.”

The Futurians and their literary adjacents were often writing utopianist thinky-stories that aimed to make a socialist future more palatable within the fandom. While many today are focusing on a hard sci-fi vs. soft/”pulpy” sci-fi divide, they’re forgetting that there were really three kinds of SFF stories: Adventure, Riddle/Puzzle, and Thinky Stories.

Sci-fi wasn’t being disconnected from Fantasy–what was happening was that the Thinky Story crowd used some hardliners of the Riddle/Puzzle-only crowd to denigrate the aspects of the Adventure stuff that they found unseemly: dames, the implausible, and in some case AmericaTM. From there, they would press the attack that it was white, capitalist, and imperialist. By undermining the aspects of SFF that some folks would today refer to as “superversive” by attacking at the editorial level and within the fandom, the socialist Thinky Story crowd was able to clear the way for more subversive fiction.

Sci-fi’s disconnection from Fantasy had far more to do with the Satanic Panic and Serious Sci-FiTM folks wanting to distance themselves from elf-shit.

But everyone at each other’s throats over scifi vs. fantasy? Congrats, you’ve been played.

Smoke Fantasy by Thomas R. Jordan appeared in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales. A scanned pdf of this issue can be found here at Luminist.org.

There really may be times when an illustration can make or break a story. And I think in this case, the illustration breaks it.

It needed something like this

Jordan’s Smoke Fantasy is a bit of a page-filler piece, and it’s not a bad one. A pulp writer is having a smoke while trying to come up with an idea for a villain for his story; in the wisps of smoke, he begins to see the vague features start to take shape. The smoke-figure becomes more and more detailed until it kills the writer. That’s really about all there is to it, and it’s totally spoiled by the illustration.

It is, however, a perfect “scary story to tell in the dark,” and it is not badly written. Try reading it for yourself and then just imagine how much more effective this piece would be with a Stephen Gammell illustration rather than the doofy cartoon by Harold Delay.

Oddly enough, it’s almost as if Jordan himself was seized by an apparition; Smoke Fantasy is Jordan’s only published story in Weird or anywhere else! Despite being written by such an obscure author, Smoke Fantasy did see reprint in the anthology “100 Creepy Little Creature Stories” where it finds itself in some rather impressive company.

Apologies if, much like the story itself, this week’s post comes across as a bit of a filler. Next week, I should have something really weird for you guys, though!

The Stratosphere Menace by Ralph Milne Farley appeared in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales. A scanned pdf of this issue can be found here at Luminist.org.

This story presented a bit of a quandary for me. Though I’m building my familiarity with the pulps slowly but surely, I’m still sometimes caught out by a story like this where I’m unsure as to which degree of self-awareness the piece was written.

In the case of The Stratosphere Menace, we have either an incredibly mediocre science fiction story, the kind of which the pulps are “known for”, or a brilliant and biting satire of the stodgier sort of scientifiction with a mad scientist and a barely competent military that stops him by merest accident. I choose to approach this piece as the latter, and I think there are just enough cues in the text to justify my reading of it as such.

A French climate scientist is on his way up in a balloon to do climate research. Everything seems hunky dory until someone finds a note from Doctor Pierre Brigaud addressed to the ABC Network anchor to be delivered once he’s aloft:

Pig! You refused to broadcast my flight into the stratosphere because you say that the mere gathering of meteorological data is note news. Bah! Well, then , I shall give you some news.

I AM GOING TO DESTROY THE EARTH!

The note briefly explains that since the earth’s upper atmosphere has 2-to-1 ratio of hydrogen to oxygen and absence of nitrogen, he can set the atmosphere on fire with a single spark and kill everyone.

I’m not all that sciency smart, but this sounds pretty silly! Can someone in the comments check me? Did folks in the 30s believe that the upper atmosphere could actually be burned off like this?

Anyway, the military scrambles to try to stop him before he gets too high, but the military red tape buys the professor just enough time that once the Colonel finally convinces the Coastal Artillery Corps Captain to actually take the shot, the balloon is just out of range.

>”I was taught at West Point that if commanded to do anything illegal, it is an officer’s duty to disobey his superior.”

>”I always said that that damned rule would make trouble some day!”

Something goes wrong and Brigaud’s machine refuses to spark and blow up the planet. He resorts to wadding up a bunch of paper and lighting it on fire; when he opens the hatch, the suction extinguishes more than just the crumpled notebook paper.

Why didn’t Brigaud’s doomsday machine work? The Sergeant who’d been tagging around behind the Colonel had taken the liberty of disconnecting some of the random looking wires that didn’t seem to be meteorological equipment. Go figure.

The Quest of Iranon, by H.P. Lovecraft appeared in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales. It can be found all over the place, but you won’t have to download a pdf if you go here.

Look at this loser

The Quest of Iranon may be the first old pulp story I’ve read and reviewed for Short Reviews that I’d already read before. While I’m a big fan of Lovecraft, I tend to prefer his science-fiction and horror to his more strictly fantasy outings. Dreamworld stuff is all right when it’s well-grounded, but much of his Dreamworld stuff I’ve generally found weaker, and The Quest of Iranon is perhaps one of my least favorites.

Iranon is a traveling bard from the city of blah, in the valley of bloop, who finds himself wandering in the lands of blarg. He longs for his wondrous city of blah and sings songs that are beautiful and haunting. He does so wandering ageless from place to place until either he’s sick of the place or the place is sick of him. Okay, so that is not entirely fair to the story, but this, of all the Lovecraft I’ve read, feels the most derivative of Dunsany.

While there is, I suppose, some lovely symbolism in this piece and pathos-evoking tragedy in the twist that Iranon was just some schlub who made up his magnificent city with which none can compare, it’s hard to escape the feel of it being merely Dunsanian homage, especially when you’ve seen Dunsany do as much or more with fewer words. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is this piece in which an author dies disillusioned of his creation, one so wonderful that the real world paled in the author’s mind, was published posthumously and alongside a story as bad as August Derleth’s The Return of Hastur.

Feel free to tell me how wrong I am about this story in the comments!

]]>https://cirsova.wordpress.com/2019/09/06/short-reviews-the-quest-of-iranon-by-h-p-lovecraft/feed/4cirsovaEdgar Rice Burroughs 100 Year Art Chronology Interview With Michael Tierneyhttps://cirsova.wordpress.com/2019/09/05/edgar-rice-burroughs-100-year-art-chronology-interview-with-michael-tierney/
https://cirsova.wordpress.com/2019/09/05/edgar-rice-burroughs-100-year-art-chronology-interview-with-michael-tierney/#respondThu, 05 Sep 2019 15:41:51 +0000http://cirsova.wordpress.com/?p=13788Chris L. Adams has just posted the first part of an extensive interview with author, artist, and comic store owner Michael Tierney about his Edgar Rice Burroughs 100 Year Art Chronology project which was published last year through Chenault & Grey.

The Return of Hastur, by August Derleth, appeared in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales. You really shouldn’t read it, but if you must, it can be found here with other, much better, stories at Luminist.org.

Going into The Return of Hastur, I was certain that August Derleth was going to be pretty bad from his reputation alone, but he turned out to be on the nose exactly as bad as I thought he would be in the very ways I knew he would be bad. The Return of Hastur drips will all of the greasy, slimy hallmarks of fan-fiction that drives me up the wall any time I hear or see the word “Lovecraftian”.

This is one of those stories where the Call of Cthulhu “Burn the Books” meme comes from. The Mary Sue’s friend and client has left in his will that someone needs to burn his house down along with several books in his library. In the very first page, we have the Innsmouth Turnpike, where said friend had an estate off of, and name-drops of Arkham, Miskatonic University, De Vermis Mysteriis, Cultes des Ghoules, Unassprechlichen Kulten, the Book of Eibon, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the R’lyeh Text, the Necronomicon, and Abdul Alhazred. ON THE FIRST PAGE. We get it, Derleth, you know all of the evil books and places from Lovecraft; you’re a big fan.

The Return of Hastur briefly flirts with being less than completely terrible, intimating certain strange things about the friend’s death, weird sounds following the wake, foul smells of a rapidly putrefying body, and some added drama of a relative willing to contest the will – obviously the man was crazy, and specifying the destruction of valuable property could testify to the state of mind of someone not all there. So, uh… the books aren’t going to get burned right away.

Of course Derleth takes his tale right back down the crapper with his fanboy signaling; his Mary Sue has business in Innsmouth because he has a client who wants to make sure his property isn’t demolished along with the other clearing of buildings along the waterfront following the government raid, because “Hey, guys, this is actually also a sequel to Shadow Over Innsmouth, isn’t that awesome!?”

During a lunch at a restaurant near Miskatonic University, a Professor of Eldritch Sciences explains to Mary the new Derlethian cosmology. Y’know, the one that craps up the mythos and lets CoC GMs stick in “good and helpful Elder Gods” to get the party out of jams?

I don’t know if this is one of the first stories where he introduces the concept (I know I’ll never read any others to pinpoint the exact moment the Cthulhu Mythos became forever tainted), but here Derleth goes into how there are two sets of Elder Gods, the “cosmic good” Elder Gods, and the “cosmic evil” Elder Gods, who are warring. And the Evil elder gods are all associated with different elements and are in conflict with one another, as well:

“But through what I have learned, it is possible to know that Great Cthulhu is of the Water Beings, even as Hastur is of the Beings that stalk the star-spaces; and it is possible to gather from vague hints in these forbidden books where some of these beings are. So I can believe that in this mythology, Great Cthulhu was banished to a place beneath the seas of Earth, while Hastur was hurled into outer space, into that place where the black stars hang, which is indicated as Aldebaran of the Hyades, which is the place mentioned by Chambers*, even as he repeats the Carcosa of Bierce.”

At this point, I was done. I gave up. I couldn’t keep going. This is the only pulp story I’ve read so far that was so terrible that I could not force myself to finish it.

Setting up the Mythos gods into Good and Evil and assigning elemental aspects to them seems not only dumb but fundamentally undermining to Lovecraft’s themes of the truly alien natures of cosmic horrors – things that were like gods, but not, things which were unknowable and inimical to human life and sanity but could not be either good or evil because they could not be understood. Nope, they can be easily shoe-horned into a nice little Aristotelian paradigm: a good and evil binary duality, and a four point elemental alignment taxonomy.

It’s been often written that Lovecraft’s horrors were, to a degree, a metaphor for the rapid advancement of science and technology over a relatively short period during which he lived and wrote. The radium age is foreshadowed in his writings. Powerful and destructive sciences were developing and revealing new things every day that redefined man’s understanding of the universe – these things were neither good nor evil, they just were, and they had potential to bring about man’s ultimate undoing.

But nope, Derleth drags Lovecraft’s monsters back into the primitive and cozy realms of good and evil, and earth, wind, fire, and water.

*Bob Chambers’s King in Yellow stories are better and more dread-inspiring than any weak attempts at shoe-horning him into the Mythos, which has also been another point of aggravation for me.